Book Club Recommendation

Micah's Child

From the boozy bacchanals of Atlanta’s smart set to the murky depths of the Tennessee River, a new novel by southern writers Diane Lang and Michael Buchanan ventures wide to reveal the meaning of salvation. Micah’s Child tells the story of teacher-socialite Catherine, (or as her friends call her, Cat), floundering in an unhappy marriage and still mourning the loss of her first child. The spark of her high society neighborhood parties, Cat has learned to hide her misery behind a glass of wine and smart repartee.

Enter Micah, an unconventional math teacher and diver who is wrestling with demons of his own. The attraction is immediate. Micah introduces Catherine to the world of artifact hunting and soon she’s trading her afternoon parties for mud-slogging adventures with Micah and friends. But when Cat accepts Micah’s invitation to co-chaperone a school diving trip to Honduras, their casual friendship takes on new meaning. Their days are spent diving with their students in the crystal depths of the gulf. In the dark heat of tropical nights, the secrets they’ve both held to for so long come crashing to the surface.

But their deepening attraction is derailed when they return to the reality of the work-a-day world. Micah is accused of improper conduct in the classroom and Cat is called on to testify. Their way of life, their professions, and their future relationship are all on the line. In the end, only Cat can make a difference.

The Plot

Still reeling from the traumas suffered during her teenage motherhood, Catherine’s self-imposed guilt keeps her locked in a loveless marriage. Her suburban neighborhood provides no solace or chance for redemption; her neighbors use metro Atlanta to hide from demons of their own past. Micah’s Child tells the story of Catherine’s path to regain her innocence. Yet along the way, she finds the one person on earth that can help her discover the truth of her younger days.

Excerpts

Micah’s Child begins during the death and decay of autumn and ends as spring evokes its time of renewal and hope. An isolated mangrove tree and the rustic dock beneath it await the return of the novel’s main characters, Micah and Catherine. The tree comes to represent sin, penance, forgiveness and redemption.

For years, Catherine grieves the death of her child. Her self-imposed guilt keeps her locked within a wasteland of addictions, obsessions, and loneliness. Unable to cope with her often absent and withdrawn husband, Catherine seduces the fish man at the local grocery store, bares her breasts for her dying dentist, and provokes her friends and neighbors any chance she gets. Her behavior alienates most of her friends, and she takes refuge in her teaching career and the voices that haunt her overactive imagination.

Yet, Catherine is a complex woman and more than willing to explore the spiritual side of life. She just has not found the right man….until she meets Micah Marlowe. Marlowe, not quite a Prince Charming, can be silent and intimidating. But, he has a unique connection to nature and is psychologically savvy enough to help Catherine overcome and understand her destructive behaviors. In fact, he takes her on a diving trip where Catherine reveals her tragic secrets….And then she dives into more than water, but into a sordid past kept hidden in the far reaches of her subliminal catacombs.

In the second half of the book, Catherine tries to put all the pieces together again. Instead of flashing her breasts, she flashes back to a jumbled adolescence of sexual violence, psychiatric wards and a home for unwed mothers. Her memories also revert to another century and to another existence invented as a safeguard for her sanity. Her invented characters creep into her current life and help her save a ghost and bury a child. As Catherine uncovers her buried past, Micah begins to recover from his own tragedy. In the end, they return to the mangrove tree that reflects the upward movement of her wild spirit and his downward need to be rooted in a passionate and loving relationship.

Read Excerpts

Reviews

• "One of the hardest thing some writers have to do is write about different personalities. That is unless the other personalities are there to write it for them.
  
  Former Chattahoochee High School English teacher Diane Lang and Chattahoochee High School math teacher Michael Buchanan worked together to write a 440-page novel titled Micah’s Child. With Lang writing most of the female characters, and Buchanan the male, the book got the interest of a number of book stores around the country.
  
  The two will be touring many of the stores for book signings from Sept. to Dec.
  
  Lang taught at Chattahoochee before moving to Saint Petersburg, Florida with her husband five years ago. She met Buchanan while the two were chaperones on a class trip to Honduras. They got along, and since then, Buchanan prodded her to write a novel.
  
  But it became more involved after she read a story Buchanan wrote about a deep sea diving trip. "It was so descriptive and had such great word choice,” Lang said Buchanan told her to use the piece in her book, but he ended up getting more than that. Before it was all over, he wrote most of the male dialogue as well as the last 100 pages of the book.
  
  "We work together so well. A lot of times I would start to write something and he would finish the sentence,” she said.
  
  The next year and a half consisted of meetings between the two, and back and forth critiques of each other’s writings. Since she lived in St. Petersburg, some of the meetings were at in-between locations. "The best two paragraphs were written in a Waffle House in Perry, Ga.,” Buchanan said
  
  The story is about a female teacher in a high society atmosphere who is in an unhappy marriage and is dealing with the loss of her first child. She meets Micah, who is a male math teacher, and leaves the world of afternoon cocktail parties for dirty artifact hunting with him, according to a press release.
  
  Their adventures come to a halt when problems arise at work and their way of life, their professions, and their future relationship are on the line, and Catherine must make a decision. Buchanan and Lang swear the novel is not about them.
  
  The couple will appear at a number of locations around the area to sign their book."
  Geoff Smith, journalist northfulton.com
• "Mike: After I left your book signing Saturday afternoon, I went home to find no one there so I spent the rest of the day finishing your book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, Mike. I can't tell you how long it's been since I sat and read a book in two days, just not being able to walk away from it.
  
  I found everything about it so appealing and enlightening. There were many parts I could relate to my own life and I gained so many new perspectives. Even after finishing, I had to spend some time absorbing it all and found myself thumbing back to reread parts that I especially enjoyed and some that still left me with questions. I have to admit that Nellie and David's story winding through left me doing a lot of thinking. I found that after awhile I believed I was getting from it what you wanted. So many of the parts that beautifully described the wonder of nature and the surroundings, brought me back to my younger days in the Pacific Northwest where I spent so much time on the beaches and in the woods just exploring everything there was to be seen. Reminded me to get back to looking at life that way again.
  
  This is a very well written novel and I do hope many people find it, enjoy it and gain as much from the words, the emotions, and the feeling as I did. Thanks so much for sharing your story with me, I really appreciate it. Bestof luck and thank you for the beautiful inscription in my copy."
  J. Plemmons, booklover

Interview

You met in Atlanta. Do you both still live there?

Mike - I do. I teach trigonometry and algebra II in the high school where Diane used to teach. When I’m not teaching, I’m diving or artifact hunting.

Diane - My husband works for a large corporation and we move around a lot. I live in Cincinnati and I used to teach and write, now I just write full-time.

How did the two of you meet and form a writing partnership?

Mike - We taught in the same high school for years. It is a huge school and we met for the first time on a school-sponsored diving expedition to Honduras.

Sort of like the characters in the book?

Diane - (Laughing) Sort of!) I was with my daughter and a friend and we were there to get our diving certification. Mike and I struck up a conversation and I was fascinated with his interest in artifact hunting. When we returned from Honduras I accompanied him on some digs and we became friends. I talked to him about a book I was writing and he told me that he was also a writer. After I moved away we kept in touch and I persuaded him to join me at the Iowa Writer’s Conference. I was working on another novel at the time and Mike helped me with some diving scenes. In a way, that was how Micah’s Child was conceived.

Micah’s Child is your first project. How did you manage to work together?

Diane - I’m still amazed at how well we work together. Mike has a real understanding of technical matters and he handled all the diving scenes. He’s also the one who wrote the spooky “alligator” scene that opens the book. He’s a very poetic writer in addition to being so technical. I took care of most of the plotting for the book and Mike filled in the details.

Mike - I can’t quite explain why it works as well as it does. I’m just happy that we can collaborate to produce books people want to read!

The book reads like it was written by one person. How did you manage that?

Mike - We both see the world through scientific eyes but understand it poetically.

What do you want the reader to take from the book?

Mike - Life is symmetrical and all things have extremes within their own possibilities.

Diane - I’d like readers to discover that it’s never too late to find their true passion.

How did you come up with the David and Nellie scenes?

Diane - They just came to me. That’s all I can say. They just wrote themselves. Here’s a rather bizarre story about Nellie. I was finishing the book and I wanted to verify that “La Boehm” could have been performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1800s. I had written that Nellie, who was an opera singer, performed there at that time. When I did my research I discovered not only that “La Boehm” was performed at that time at the Met, but that the star of the production was a singer named Nellie [last name]. It gave me goose bumps!

There are a lot of similarities between your lives and those of Micah and Cat. Is your story fiction or non-fiction?

Diane - It’s pure fiction, with a little truth attached.

Mike - I’m not saying.